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Hillary Clinton’s Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps

“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Hillary Clinton said Wednesday at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St. Patrick’s Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential candidates had jumped on.

Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton’s campaign refused, explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to.

As it became clear on Tuesday night that Mrs. Clinton would lose to Donald J. Trump, supporters cast blame on everything from the news media to the F.B.I. director’s dogged pursuit of Mrs. Clinton over her personal emails, and to a deep discomfort with electing a woman as president.

But as the dust settled, Democrats recognized two central problems of Mrs. Clinton’s flawed candidacy: Her decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the anti-establishment and anti-Wall Street rage.

And she ceded the white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992. Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump’s support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.

Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.

In the end, Mr. Trump’s simple promise to “Make America Great Again,” a catchphrase Mrs. Clinton dismissed as a vow to return to a racist past already long disappeared, would draw enough white Americans to the polls to make up for his low minority support.

“The emerging demographic majority isn’t quite there yet,” said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former White House communications director. “The idea you can get to a presidential campaign and just press a button and they’ll vote, it’s not there yet.”

Mrs. Clinton had planned to conclude her 19-month campaign with an elaborate victory celebration on Tuesday night, complete with confetti shaped like glass shards that would fall from the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan — an extravagant production to mark the history of the evening.

Instead, in a hastily scheduled speech in a dreary hotel ballroom on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton gave her concession speech, declaring the country “more deeply divided than we thought.”

“This loss hurts,” she said. “But please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”

The weaknesses in her candidacy, Ms. Dunn and other Democratic leaders said on Wednesday, were more than demographic. Though she and outside groups raised half a billion dollars to take on Mr. Trump with the most sophisticated ground game modern politics had seen, spanning the barrios of Orlando, Fla., black churches of North Carolina and the casinos of Nevada, the rationale for her run seemed more of a repudiation of Mr. Trump than Mrs. Clinton’s own positive vision for the country.

Even Mrs. Clinton’s closing chant in the final days of her campaign — “Love trumps hate!” — sounded like a play on her opponent’s name rather than her own inspiring vision.

Her campaign had built-in contradictions and challenges. She wanted to make history as the first female president, but she did not want to play it up so much so that she would turn off men. She vowed to help the little guy, but she accepted millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street. She wanted to bring the country together, but she suffered from a stubbornly high number of voters who did not trust or like her.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign tested out 84 slogans. There was “She’s Got Your Back,” “Strength You Can Count On” and “Real Fairness, Real Solutions.”

“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” Joel Benenson, the campaign’s chief strategist and pollster, asked the chairman of her campaign, John D. Podesta, ahead of a New Hampshire speech, according to a hacked email that was among the thousands released by WikiLeaks.

Mrs. Clinton had defeated Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the primary race by rallying older African-American voters and Democratic women, but she seemed disconnected from the white working class that delivered Mr. Sanders’s victories in Michigan and Wisconsin. Mr. Trump won Wisconsin on Tuesday and appeared to have narrowly won Michigan, as well.

He won 67 percent of the vote among non-college-educated whites, compared with 28 percent for Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls.

Early on, Mr. Clinton had pleaded with Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, to do more outreach with working-class white and rural voters. But his advice fell on deaf ears.

The sophisticated data modeling Mr. Mook relied on showed that young, Latino and black voters would turn out as they had hoped. But while they favored Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly, she could not run up the score with them like Mr. Obama had in 2012.

With voters 29 and younger, for example, Mrs. Clinton won by 18 points, down from Mr. Obama’s 22 points in 2012, and 29 points in 2008, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

The Clinton campaign was also betting on college-educated suburban voters who ended up drifting away from Mrs. Clinton in the final days, which the campaign attributes to the F.B.I.’s renewed focus on her emails as early voting began.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Brian Fallon, said the campaign did not cede white working-class voters to Mr. Trump, pointing to a bus tour Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, went on in rural pockets of Ohio and Pennsylvania after the Democratic National Convention in July. He added that shaving into Mr. Trump’s lead among these voters would not have given Mrs. Clinton a path to victory.

The campaign also appeared to overestimate how offended Mr. Trump’s female supporters would be by an “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump is heard bragging about grabbing women by the genitals. Mr. Trump lost among women by 12 percentage points, exit polls showed, about the same deficit Mitt Romney had in 2012.

In the final weeks of the campaign, a despondent Mr. Clinton held a flurry of his own events in Ohio, Iowa, the Florida Panhandle and Wisconsin, talking to the white voters who like him but who view his wife with distrust.

“I think Bill Clinton was right” about the need to concentrate more in those areas, said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat, pointing to Mr. Trump’s victories in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, states Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had largely overlooked.

Former Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania also said he had encouraged campaign aides at Mrs. Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters to spread their vast resources outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and focus on rural white pockets of the state. “We had the resources to do both,” Mr. Rendell said Wednesday. “The campaign — and this was coming from Brooklyn — didn’t want to do it.” (Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania by one percentage point.)

But Mr. Jacobs and others said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign leadership thought Mrs. Clinton was an imperfect messenger to connect with Rust Belt voters on issues like global trade deals, which she had previously supported.

“In 2000 and 2008, working-class voters saw her as their champion — it was the core of her support,” said Mark Penn, the chief strategist of Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “By 2016, issues of trade, stagnated wages and immigration had piled up, and Trump was successful at exploiting those against her.”

The situation was made worse in September, when Mrs. Clinton described half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Afterward, she told one adviser that she knew she had “just stepped in it.”

And in the end, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed proved more powerful than any of Mrs. Clinton’s poll-tested slogans, said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic political consultant.

“Class anger won,” he said, delivering a staggering defeat to the Clinton strategy of “more money, more consultants, more polling and more of a campaign based on what we thought we knew rather than what the electorate felt.”

Megan Thee-Brenan contributed reporting.

Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the Morning Briefing newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section P, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clinton’s Campaign of Hope and Missteps. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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